Mildly Interesting

Billionaires: "So you're saying we either have to give up gambling with other people's money or labor laws? Hmmm...So, uh, how many slaves you need?"

["Angel" by Sarah McLaughlin starts playing in the background]

[Fade in: B-Roll of sad, emaciated, juvenile guillotines doing chores in a squalid shanty town.]

Narrator: [Voiceover] For less than one dollar per day, you could help feed a starving guillotine like Pierre, or Jacques or Gabriel. They haven't done anything wrong except be born into a community without access to the nourishing blood of the ultra wealthy that they so desperately need. So please, call today. You'll be glad you did.

"Okay, I just got this great new idea. You know how freight by truck is so much more expensive than by ship? I think I figured out a way to get the costs down and apply it not just to freight, but transit too. I just saw a YouTube video on physics. We need to reduce the rolling resistance, for starters. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking hard, smooth wheels would slide all over a road of the same material. However, I took one of my private jets to lunch yesterday and took a walk on the Via Appia Antica. It has these cool little grooves carved by centuries of wagon use. They would even help guide the carts! Now you might say that still leaves the problem of having a big, expensive road. I got you covered. We take the inverse of that arrangement. Instead of recessed, curved groves and flat wheels, we use raised, flat strips (or rails, if you will); curved, convex wheels and ditch the rest of the road entirely. We'll save billions on this road made of rails and that's just a start! What's the most expensive part of the truck? The tractor, that's right! So now that our rolling resistance is down by a lot we can pull more trailers. I call them "Carry-All Retention Sytems" or "CARS" for short. Also, the harder surfaces means we can use bigger, more powerful engines. We could have a tractor trailer arrangement longer than several trucks, kinda like how a bridal train is sometimes longer than the dress itself."

"Do you hear yourself? Rail, Road, cars, train."

"Uh, oh. Did I just invent trains again?"

"Yeah, it's like the third time you've done it. Unless you can come up with something that'll add value to trains, I think we'd better move on."

"Umm...AI? We put an AI on the trains, in the trains or maybe in the control centers?"

"Ugh, goddammit! I'll assemble the investors."

I think developing high speed rail lines in the US is still a good thing. The US is severely lacking and behind other countries in that regard.

What I'm gathering from the article is this:

1. Florida regulations stupidly ban train horns in many places where they should be. Doesn't seem like the fight of high speed rail itself, but rather the regional government.

2. High speed rail lines are supposed to have fences around the tracks I guess so pedestrians can't cross away from crossings?? That seems to be the biggest issue that I gathered from the article.

So am I reading that correctly? Seems as though these issues are supposed to be addressed by the government.

Romero saw a slow-moving freight train and drove around the gates to try to beat it. A police report said Romero was ‘oblivious’ to the fact that a much faster Brightline train was approaching from the other direction.

I wouldn't say a lack of safety guards nor the train itself is to blame in this instance.

Do you even know how many people are killed by cars each year? This is nothing compared to that. Most cases cited here are because people acted completely recklessly. The same can't be said about many car accidents.

I was going to say, of all places, Florida has got some of the worst geography and city planning for this type of project.